Memorials become a familiar sight in Chicago's toughest neighborhoods

Makeshift shrines testify to violence that plagues city

June 18, 2014|By Jeremy Gorner, Tribune reporter

Family and friends spell out "Kendall" with candles on May 18 at a memorial outside Kendall Floyd's home in the 3400 block of West Madison Street. Floyd, 20, had been shot and killed near the spot a day earlier. (Nuccio DiNuzzo, Chicago Tribune)

Mourners placed two bottles of Kendall Floyd's favorite tequila on the ground, tied red and white balloons to a chain-link fence and scribbled rest-in-peace messages on posters set up in his honor.

A night earlier, on May 17, the 20-year-old had been fatally shot just steps away on Madison Street, about 2 miles west of the United Center.

Floyd's cousin, Shakirra Hilliard, wailed as she gazed at a photo of him taped to a poster, his middle finger playfully extended.

"I wanna stay right here. I wanna look at my cousin," she told a woman trying to console her. "… He didn't do nothing!"

It is a scene that plays out often on Chicago's toughest streets. Friends and loved ones erect a makeshift memorial on or near the spot of a violent death. It is a place to remember, honor and grieve a sudden, tragic, sometimes inevitable loss. The crude memorials can survive hours, days, weeks, months — even more than a year amid harsh weather conditions.

The memorials can be touchy subjects for police, who fear they glorify violence in gang-related killings, but the displays of liquor bottles, teddy bears and candles serve as gathering spots for unofficial urban wakes. Neighbors, friends and relatives pray, cry or just laugh at the memory of someone they have lost.

The makeshift shrines have become a testament to the violence that plagues the city.

"It's a way that people pay homage to the fallen," said James Pate, an artist who used depictions of street memorials to complement his charcoal drawings in the "Kin Killin' Kin" exhibit last year at the DuSable Museum of African American History on the South Side. "Once they're weathered, they even take on another kind of appearance, the teddy bears drenched in rain. ... When they're first put up, they almost look festive."

These impromptu memorials could not be found 20 years ago, according to DePaul University sociologist William Sampson, yet now they are part of the landscape in big cities across the country.

"I thought this was a little gaudy and out of control, but the purpose of gaudy is to get noticed," Sampson, who heads the school's Department of Public Policy, recalled when he first noticed memorials years ago on TV news. Mourners, he said, are "trying to bring attention to not only the victims but to themselves as well."

Floyd's uncle Cleodis Hilliard, a lifelong West Sider, understands too well the human toll represented by the memorials.

"A lot of my friends, they gone. They're not here no more, so I've signed a lot of them," Hilliard, 35, said last month while sipping a cup of Remy Martin cognac near his nephew's memorial. "That's the way we pay our respects. I don't like funerals. I like to remember people the way they were."

'He was loved'

Three young women emerged from a side street about 10:30 p.m. and walked up to a tree at the corner of Fulton Street and Pine Avenue in the South Austin neighborhood on the West Side. They wondered aloud if there were enough posters. If enough candles were lit on the ground. If the blue crescent moon stuffed toy taped to the tree was the right touch.

"It's not even enough," one woman said. "Not for his big heart it ain't."

They were talking about Charles Lee, 32, who was fatally shot the day before — May 17 — while driving near Austin Polytechnical Academy High School. Wounded, Lee crashed into a wrought-iron fence at the corner. The impact bent some of the iron bars. Police say Lee was affiliated with the Four Corner Hustlers street gang.

Dozens of messages already filled three posters taped around a tree. "GONE TOO SOON," said a message written by Ciera Wilson, one of the three friends visiting the tree the next night.

Hours earlier, Wilson and a friend went to a CVS pharmacy and a dollar store to print up photos of Lee and buy posters and candles. Close friends of Lee's since childhood, they also bought red and white balloons, tying them around the tree.

"We wanted people to know that he was loved and there are people who ... are hurting over this," Wilson said.

More people walked over to the tree as the roar of a Green Line "L" train sounded a block away. They laid more candles down. The approximately 15 mourners attracted the attention of Louise Coleman, an older woman whom youths in the neighborhood call "Grandma."

"Are you all OK?" she asked the visitors before offering to lead them in prayer. Everyone joined hands and circled the tree.

"We know that there is power in unity," said Coleman, drawing an occasional "Yes" and "Thanks Lord" from the group. " ... We pray, oh father in heaven, that our beloved brother who has come to join you, we hope that his soul is rested."

The crowd swelled to about 50 people as it drew closer to midnight. Mourners lit candles on the grass beside the tree, positioning them to spell "CHUCK."

By the next morning, candle wax smeared the dirt. A few candles remained lit. One poster flapped back and forth in the wind.